Writers: Shane Black, Greg Hicks
DOP: Ward Russell
Cast: Bruce Willis, Damon Wayans, Taylor Negrons
An LAPD detective's protected female witness is murdered, prompting him and her boyfriend to investigate the crime that leads to a corrupt politician and a crooked football team owner.
The film had a lot riding on it on the back of Bruce Willis' success with the Die Hard films and Shane Black's script being at that point of time the most expensive one to be bought. It apparently had lot of production difficulties with Tony Scott clashing with Bruce Willis and Joel Silver, the producer. The script also underwent a lot of rewrites and you do feel that while watching the film. It begins quite well establishing the extremely cynical character played by Bruce Willis. He ends up reluctantly teaming up with the banned quarterback character played by Damon Wayans. It is another one of those odd couple films with lots of over the top action and violence filmed in the 90s style. The script that is quite clever in the first half of the film turns quite shit with blatant expositions and tonal shifts by the end. It didn't do well at the box office and that put an end to the sequel idea that they had planned for it at the end of the film.
Overall it begins as a fun watch which becomes quite ridiculous, in a bad way, as the film progresses. Bruce Willis has plenty of funny lines and some cringe-inducing ones as well. Early 90s had plenty of experiments going on with the ways films looked and edits were done. Some of them, like Natural Born Killers, haven't aged well at all. But I did like the look of this film.
Rating: 2.5/5
